I've always had this rather romantically vague idea that you could not go wrong with a Booker Prize winner. In actual fact I have just been looking at the list of past winners and find that a) I have read remarkably few of them and b) I have not invariably enjoyed the ones I have read. If you are interested, here are the statistics, with the ones I liked in pink and the ones I didn't in blue. I have read:
1975: Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, Heat and Dust
1977: Paul Scott, Staying On
1981: Salman Rushdie, Midnight's Children
1988: Peter Carey, Oscar and Lucinda
1989:
Kazuo Ishiguro, Remains of the Day
1990: A S Byatt, Possession
1997: Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things
1998: Ian McEwan, Amsterdam
2001: Peter Carey, The True History of the Kelly Gang
And now I can add another one -- 1987: Penelope Lively, Moon Tiger -- and yes, folks, it is blue. I have read a few P Lively's before and liked them a lot, so why did I dislike this so intensely? Because that is what I did. I am not saying that it is a bad book, mind, and in fact I am sure it is a very good book and that in 1987 it was probably astonishing. By that I mean that the multiple narrators and the jumping around through time must have seemed a great deal more innovative and challenging than it did to me reading it in 2001. If you have not read it, this is the story of a 76-year-old woman, Claudia Hampton, who is on her deathbed. Visitors come and go, the nurses periodically patronise and irritate her, but the novel is concerned with her memories of her past life. She has been a successful popular historian and, in her own mind, is now writing what she calls a history of the world, based on her own past. We learn of her childhood, her wartime experiences in Cairo, her passionate love affair with a young soldier which ends with his death, her pregnancy and miscarriage, a second love affair resulting in a daughter, and, quite late on, we learn of her early intense and passionate incestuous relationship with her brother. All this is done with immense skill, mainly transmitted through Claudia's own consciousness but interspersed with the reactions of her friends and family, so that some events are retold several times from different points of view. Clever stuff, undoubtedly. And, if I'm honest, the reason I didn't like it was because I disliked Claudia so much. Now if I had been teaching this to a bunch of students -- and thanks goodness I am not -- and someone had said this, I'd have been the first to say that this was not a valid reason for disliking the novel. Yes, Claudia is opinionated, headstrong, inconsiderate, bitter, a terrible mother and absolutely beastly to her poor silly sister-in-law, but surely that is what makes the novel so interesting. But I'm afraid all that went out of the window and I could hardly bring myself to finish the book, even though I could see how well written it was. Sometime I will tell you why I disliked the other blue ones!
